After 15 months of genocide - and resistance to it - the Israeli regime realized that they could not win a military victory against Hamas, and were forced to sign a humiliating ceasefire in order to get their hostages returned.
With much of Syria under the control of Al-Qaeda, and an increasing level of covert infiltration into Lebanon, the crisis in the Middle East is not over, and we may still be in its beginning stages, as the center of hegemony continues its gradual shift away from the United States. Their navy, once considered the best in the world, is likely also not very happy about their ships and aircraft carriers being forced to retreat by Yemen, one of the poorest countries; and all eyes are on Iran, who has, over the last year and a half, demonstrated a newfound confidence and strength to directly strike Israel.
The recovery for Gaza will take, at a minimum, decades; it could indeed never fully recovery to even how it was before, considering it is not in Israel's interests to see their concentration camps recover. But Hamas has proven to be steadfast and the tunnel network has proven its resilience, despite facing some of the most powerful conventional bombing in history. This shows that Palestine's liberation is a when, not an if; and hopefully a much sooner "when" than expected before October 7th.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack
The article is paywalled so text is in the spoiler. But jfc this is evil. I take this to mean that talk of the IDF using AI tools to determine “if we bomb this building we may kill 40 civilians but there a 75% chance of also killing a Resistance fighter”… probably was Google’s stuff specifically.
spoiler
SAN FRANCISCO — Google employees have worked to provide Israel’s military with access to the company’s latest artificial intelligence technology from the early weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.The internal documents show Google directly assisting Israel’s Defense Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces, despite the company’s efforts to publicly distance itself from the country’s national security apparatus after employee protests against a cloud computing contract with Israel’s government.
Google fired more than 50 employees last year after they protested the contract, known as Nimbus, over fears it could see Google technology aid military and intelligence programs that have harmed Palestinians. In the weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas militants, a Google employee in its cloud division escalated requests for increased access to the company’s AI technology from Israel’s Defense Ministry, the documents obtained by The Post show. The documents, which detail projects inside Google’s cloud division, indicate that the Israeli ministry urgently wanted to expand its use of a Google service called Vertex, which clients can use to apply AI algorithms to their own data. A Google employee warned in one document that if the company didn’t quickly provide more access, the military would turn instead to Google’s cloud rival Amazon, which also works with Israel’s government under the Nimbus contract.
Another document, from mid-November 2023, showed the employee thanking a co-worker for helping handle the Defense Ministry request. The documents do not indicate exactly how the Defense Ministry planned to use Google’s AI technology or how it might have contributed to military operations.
Other documents dated from the spring and summer of 2024 show Google employees requesting additional access to AI technology for the IDF.
As recently as November 2024, by which time a year of Israeli airstrikes had turned much of Gaza to rubble, documents show Israel’s military was still tapping Google for its latest AI technology. Late that month, an employee requested access to the company’s Gemini AI technology for the IDF, which wanted to develop its own AI assistant to process documents and audio, according to the documents.
Spokespeople for the IDF, Google and Amazon all declined to comment for this article. Google has previously said that the Nimbus contract with Israel’s government is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
The documents obtained by The Post do not indicate how Israel’s military used Google’s AI capabilities, which can be used for tasks such as automating administrative functions far from the front lines.
Gaby Portnoy, director general of the Israeli government’s National Cyber Directorate, suggested at a conference early last year that the Nimbus contract directly aided combat applications, according to an article from People and Computers, the Israeli media outlet that hosted the conference.
“Thanks to the Nimbus public cloud, phenomenal things are happening during the fighting, these things play a significant part in the victory — I will not elaborate,” he said. Israel’s military has for years been expanding its AI capabilities to speed up processing of surveillance imagery and selection of potential military targets.
After the IDF began its assault on Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks, it turned to an AI tool called Habsora developed internally to provide commanders with thousands of human and infrastructure targets to bomb, contributing to the violence in Gaza, according to a previous investigation by The Post.
Habsora is built on top of hundreds of algorithms that analyze data such as intercepted communications and satellite imagery to generate coordinates of potential military targets such as rockets or tunnels. But some Israeli commanders have raised concerns about the technology’s accuracy, The Post reported. Others worried that too much trust was being placed in the technology’s recommendations, eroding the quality of Israeli intelligence analysis.
It is unclear whether the Habsora project or its development involved the use of commercial cloud computing services.
A senior IDF official told The Post in an interview last summer that the military had invested heavily in new cloud technologies, hardware and other back-end computing systems, often in partnership with U.S. companies. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security topics.
The IDF also tested technology from multiple companies as it explored potential applications for generative AI, the technology behind the recent flourishing of chatbots and other AI tools, the official said. The uses included scanning audio, video and text from IDF systems as part of an audit of the military’s operations leading into the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Google has been a major contractor to Israel’s government since 2021, when it, along with Amazon, was selected by Israeli officials for the multibillion-dollar Nimbus cloud computing contract aimed at making sweeping upgrades to Israeli government technology. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post. The deal saw the rival companies build data centers in Israel and agree to provide cloud software and storage to government departments. At the time, Israeli officials told local media that the deal would include working with the Israeli military.
Nimbus has faced protests from some Google and Amazon employees, who say their companies shouldn’t do business with Israel’s government because of its treatment of Palestinians.
The loudest protests have come from Google workers who are concerned that the contract might allow its AI technology to be enlisted by Israeli military and intelligence agencies that they believe regularly violate human rights in Gaza and the West Bank.
When Google acquired the British AI start-up DeepMind in 2014, the terms of the acquisition stipulated that DeepMind technology would never be used for military or surveillance purposes, lab founder Demis Hassabis said in a 2015 interview. Today, Hassabis is one of the company’s most powerful executives and leads all its AI development work under the brand Google DeepMind, a portfolio that includes image, video and voice technologies and its generative AI assistant Gemini.
Google has AI policies that pledge the company will not apply the technology to uses that harm people. Its human rights program says the company reviews its products and policies for compliance with international standards like the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and invites employees to raise any concerns they have about the company’s work.
Last summer, a group of more than 100 employees emailed Google managers and members of the company’s human rights team asking them to review the company’s work with the Israeli military, according to a Google employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. The requests were ignored, the employee said.
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